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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#341

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

bradly wrote: post #339
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until LLMs came along, there wasn’t much you could do to improve Siri’s underlying technology. You could throw a thousand monkeys at to add more phrases it could match on and improve the interface to let you know what you could do. But that’s about it.

LLMs would help a lot, but there was a lot of low hanging fruit. During my time at Apple I worked on some of the evaluation of Siri's quality and saw first hand how the org issues affected Siri's path forward.

Now I’m curious. What could have been improved about Siri other than “bringing in 1000 monkeys” to add more phrases for intent matching before LLMs?

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#342

Post by pixl97 »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #154
epistasis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siri was also completely miscommunicated from the beginning. I could never get Siri to do what I wanted, because I didn't realize that it had a very strict and narrow menu, but it never communicated what that menu was, and had no way of saying "here are the 5 things you can tell me about." And then there were the network communication issues where you don't know why you're not getting a response, or if Siri is going…

In game design we used to call this opacity “hunt the verb” in text adventures. All chat bots suffer this flaw. GUIs solve it. CLIs could be said to have it, but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual.

>GUIs solve it.

Very charitable, but rarely true.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#345

Post by bradly »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #341
bradly wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs would help a lot, but there was a lot of low hanging fruit. During my time at Apple I worked on some of the evaluation of Siri's quality and saw first hand how the org issues affected Siri's path forward.

Now I’m curious. What could have been improved about Siri other than “bringing in 1000 monkeys” to add more phrases for intent matching before LLMs?

Good question. While I had a fairly narrow view of a very large system, I'll give my personal perspective.

I worked on systems for evaluating the quality of models over time and for evaluating the quality of new models before release to understand how the new models would perform compared to current models once in the wild. It was difficult to get Siri to use these tools that were outside of their org. While this wouldn't solve the breadth of Siri's functionality issues, it would have helped improve the overall user experience with the existing Siri features to avoid the seemingly reduction of quality over time.

Secondly, and admittedly farther from where I was... Apple could have started the move from ML models to LLMs much sooner. The underlying technology for LLMs started gaining popularity in papers and research quite a few years ago, and there was a real problem of each team developing their own ML models for search, similarity, recommendations, etc that were quite large and that became a problem for mobile device delivery and storage. If leadership had a way to bring the orgs together they may have landed on LLMs much sooner.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#346

Post by ben_w »

danielheath wrote: post #8
gedy wrote: post #6

Was anything even attempted? Looking from outside, Siri is same always been, and no improvement in a decade.

Ten years ago, if it didn't understand what I meant, it told me so after 1-2 seconds. Now, it'll show a loading indicator for 5-6 seconds and then do nothing at all... or do something entirely unrelated to my request (eg responding to "hey siri, how much is fourteen kilograms in pounds" by playing a song from my music library).

I don't have anything in my music library, both Siri and Alexa (via a Spotify account I don't have) have responded to "${room I'm in} on" with their versions of "I can't find ${room name} in your music collection".

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#347

Post by antipaul »

bombcar wrote: post #277
torlok wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Looks like everybody's complaining that Siri isn't a better Ask Jeeves, when that's not the design goal. What people expect is an LLM that has full access to the phone. Nobody's even remotely close to shipping that.

I just want "set timer for 5 minutes" and "what time is it" to work reliably, 100% of the time.

Works on Siri! You can even set – get this – multiple timers ;)

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#348

Post by dyauspitr »

sebstefan wrote: post #322
dyauspitr wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS, iPadOS and watchOS are all still the best at what they do.

Me installing an app to transfer a movie to my girlfriend's iPhone, but we don't have a cable for it. You need a third party app called LocalSend, but that can't work, because the only WiFi we have access to is a complicated university gateway that won't support LocalSend, so I open up a mobile hotspot, but somehow iPhones can't connect to that. So we give up.

Airdrop?

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#349

Post by QuercusMax »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #249
QuercusMax wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacOS (or whatever they're calling it now) for all its faults is still probably the best desktop OS for getting things done without having to fiddle around much. ChromeOS is close but still so far in many ways. And for audio production - I'm just a dabbler, really, but I've been able to do some really impressive things with just GarageBand and a Fender Mustang Micro amp-plug over USB-C. It "just works" unlike my expe…

> ChromeOS is close but still so far in many ways. I continue to be impressed by ChromeOS. With the Linux development environment (Debian VM), it is a brilliant work environment. Add Android apps as well and ChromeOS is an awesome convergence platform. There are Chromebooks that are high enough quality that I don't miss anything about Apple OS or Microsoft Windows. > And for audio production For specialty use-cases,…

It's not driver support for audio stuff. Drivers are great; haven't had any issues at all. The UI for the software, especially DAWs, is just plain garbage. It shouldn't be this bad; I'm halfway tempted to start my own project to put together a fork of one of these DAWs with a UX that doesn't suck.

Technically a lot of stuff for linux audio is amazing; it just lacks the level of polish to enable someone to actually just use it out of the box.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#350

Post by elAhmo »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #265
bradly wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs passed away the day after Siri’s release, and I don’t think anyone else had the confidence and internal credibility to push the hard organizational changes Siri needed, similar to when he moved Apple to a single P&L when he returned.

Until LLMs came along, there wasn’t much you could do to improve Siri’s underlying technology. You could throw a thousand monkeys at to add more phrases it could match on and improve the interface to let you know what you could do. But that’s about it.

If someone has the resources to do this, it is Apple. For a product that can be used by billions of people, having an engineer dedicated to a single intent wouldn't be that wasteful :D
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